Shoot in the Golden Hours

Most of the landscape images that are captured during hours/first light or dusk/late in the evening called the golden hours appear wow. The golden hours happens twice a day at sunrise and at sunset. This provides photographers an opportunity to capture images in the so called best light of the day. You can easily get the timings for a given location either online or using apps.

In order to capture the spectacular colors in the sky during the golden hours, you might want to do a bit of homework before your actual work begins. First the timings of golden hours. Followed by this is the location, it’s good to explore the location a bit during day time so that you get the ideal place to capture images and also prepare yourself in composing the image. Get familiar with the location. You may search online for images that were already captured by other photographers just to know how good it may appear and how you can avoid taking a very similar kind of image. Check for the images that were captured during day time as well as during golden hours so that you get an idea on what to expect.

Mt.Trishul as viewed from Gairoli Patal, Uttarakhand, India in the evening.
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Once you have done your homework to capture images during golden hours, see that you go to the location atleast 1 hour or 30 minutes earlier and keep the camera, tripod and all other camera settings ready. Don’t be lazy to wake up early in the morning. Now that everything is ready, try if you can capture images in diffused light. When the sun is low in the sky (during golden hours), it creates diffused light. The bright orange/multi colored sky can bring in more contrast and colors to your image. You might also find blue or purple sky during twilight hours that is before sunrise or after sunset. Twilight appears for a very short time, maybe for just 30 minutes and happens twice a day and the timings change through out the year. It happens when the sun is very close to horizon.

About the gear, a camera body with a wide angle lens for landscape and a sturdy tripod as you are capturing images in low light. You might want to capture images with a bit higher ISO and lower aperture (a bit wide open). You may experiment with slower shutter to get some cloud movement effect in the image. Give it a try and let me know if that helped. Don’t forget to share this post and follow me on social media to get more updates of this kind.